


Mirrors

by xxwrote_my_way_outxx



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: Angst, Danatole, Gender Dysphoria, Implied Transphobia, Implied homophobia, M/M, Trans Male Character, Trans!Anatole, implied anorexia, m/m - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 15:29:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11831616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxwrote_my_way_outxx/pseuds/xxwrote_my_way_outxx
Summary: The blonde would spend seconds, minutes, hours, days…months, just staring at himself. No, not in an act of vanity. His eyes scrutinized each feature of himself, finding something ugly in himself each time he sat in front of it.





	Mirrors

Anatole never placed a candle in front of the mirror. 

He always placed himself there. 

The blonde would spend seconds, minutes, hours, days…months, just staring at himself. No, not in an act of vanity. His eyes scrutinized each feature of himself, finding something ugly in himself each time he sat in front of it. He touched his lips, finding them much too big and much too feminine, and he pouted, disgusted with himself. His hair was too soft, and his eyes were too round. It was increasingly aggravating. The way that his hips curved beneath his pants and his jacket made him squirm with discomfort, and his breasts beneath the bindings of the tight cloth that was the only remedy made him feel uncomfortable in his own skin. 

The dysphoria made it worse. 

The creeping, dirty feeling that crawled under his skin and through his body like a parasitic virus made him want to peel away at his skin. He was so confused. What was he supposed to do? 

Some days he would just sob into his hands, and shake on the floor of the bathroom. He’d run out of tears, but the dry sobs continued the wreck his body until it tired out and he couldn’t cry any longer. Some days, he would stay beneath the covers in bed and simple gaze out the window, wondering how nature could flow so easily and be beautiful and what it wanted to be and what he was meant to be, yet he had to wallow in his own disgust in how unnatural he felt. And some days, Dolokhov would just sit there with him, and tell him that he was beautiful, just as nature was, and that Anatole was perfect the way he was, even though Anatole felt like the most perverted object to be created. 

And then there were the days that Anatole would get drunk and forget, and he would act pompous and self-absorbed. The only way to battle his own insecurities was to be over-confident, which rubbed people the wrong way and rubbed himself the wrong way. He disgusted himself. But belittling others and making others inferior made Anatole feel equal, instead of some horrid malfunction in society.  
And he would just hate himself even more. 

And one day he decided to place the candle in front of the mirror. What was he fated for? The longer he sat there and waited and the longer the candle flickered and the longer he stewed, the more Anatole swore that his image was morphing. Morphing into something hideous and grotesque- a reminder of what he was born with and what he didn’t have, and what his heart couldn’t mend and his mind couldn’t conquer. 

“Anatole, dinner is ready.” 

The thought of dinner made him want to vomit. He hated eating. Eating made everything worse. If he gained weight he gained it on his hips, and he looked womanly. If he lost weight, his hips stuck out, and he’d look womanly. He didn’t move from where he cradled himself in the bathroom. 

“Anatole, dinner is ready.” 

The familiar voice called again. 

Anatole wanted to scream at him. To tell him to stop feeding him. To tell him to stop looking at him like a poor and wounded animal, even though Dolokhov was the only one who understood. Dolokhov was the only one who helped. 

There was no one else for him to yell at or to vent to, because nobody else cared. 

Nobody else was Dolokhov. 

“Anatole..” Dolokhov breathed when he peaked into the bathroom and saw his lover on the floor and curled up, back into the habit of staring at himself. The older man walked in behind him and closed the door. He licked his fingers and gently put out the fire on the wick and sat down. Anatole willingly scooted back into the pit of his lap and closed his eyes when he felt Dolokhov’s arms wrap around his torso and hold him tightly. The pressure made the disgust go away for a few moments.

“It’s never going to go away.” Anatole whispered, “I keep seeing it..it’s never going to go away, and I’m ugly, and it’s never going to go away.” 

“You are not ugly.” 

“How am I not? I hardly look masculine. I look nothing like you, I look nothing like Pierre, or Andrei…I look like a woman.”

“But you are a man.” Dolokhov reassured, rubbing the other’s stomach gently, “It doesn’t matter if you have feminine features, for you are a man in my eyes as are the others, perhaps even more of a man than they are.” He rested his chin on Anatole’s slightly broad shoulders that were enhanced by the shoulder padding he wore beneath the surface of his jacket. “Don’t trust what the mirror shows you. The longer you stare at it, the more morphed an image becomes. Art turns into travesty, and you’re anything but, my love, okay?” He kissed his shoulder and murmured, “You’re handsome to me, lovely, and absolutely stunning.”

 

“You don’t have to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying, Toly.” 

“How can you find me handsome through all of this?”

“All of what?” 

“All of my…issues. All of my insecurities and my doubts.”

“Because those issues aren’t you, your insecurities won’t last forever, and your doubts can be fixed. And I’m willing to wait until those fade away. Watching you grow and blossom as a person is amazing and something I am so lucky to witness, because I know that one day you’ll see how much of an amazing flower you grew to be.” He kissed Anatole’s neck as he felt the strain there, and he could tell that Anatole was crying. 

Anatole wasn’t crying because he was sad. He had gotten all of those tears out. He was crying because he knew he was in the arms of a man who loved him, despite the constant struggle of his dysphoria and his ever-changing body image, and the sickness and malnourishment that went with it. He could never understand how he could have gotten so lucky as to have found someone as willing and caring as Dolokhov, despite his rough exterior and sometimes strict and cruel manners with other people. Even though Dolokhov could be cold to the world, he was always warm to Anatole. 

And the next day, all the mirrors were removed from the house.


End file.
